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Eileen Norcross

Vice President of Policy Research

Senior Research Fellow

Eileen Norcross is the Vice President of Policy Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. As a scholar for the Mercatus Center’s State and Local Policy Project, she focuses on questions of public finance and how economic institutions support or hamper economic resiliency and civil society. She specializes in fiscal federalism and institutions, state and local government finance, public sector pensions, public administration, and economic development. She is the lead author of Ranking the States Fiscal Condition.

Her work has been cited in various media outlets, and her op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, and Forbes. She blogs on state and local policy at Neighborhood Effects.

Norcross has testified before Congress on the Community Development Block Grant program, state and local pension underfunding, municipal bankruptcy, and the use of technology to monitor stimulus funding. She has also testified on fiscal and budgetary policies in Pennsylvania, Florida, California, New Hampshire, and Montana. Her academic publications include articles in the Maryland Journal and a book chapter in The Political Economy of Hurricane Katrina and Community Rebound, edited by Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Henry Storr.

Previously, Norcross was a Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC; a consultant at KPMG’s transfer-pricing division; and a research analyst with Thompson Financial Securities Data. She received both her MA in economics and her BA in economics and American history from Rutgers University.